World Meditation Day
World Meditation Day is celebrated every May 21st yearly. The holiday seeks in making awareness the benefits of meditation, especially in this busy world of endless movement. Meditation itself had been the practice that had been traced to prehistoric times, since 3000 B.C., when this was referenced in the earliest Indian texts. It has roots also in the 3rd-century China. This practice includes using methods such as focusing on object, mindfulness, thoughts, or activities to attain an emotionally stable and calm state. Now, meditation has transcended the past stereotypes and goes into the mainstream culture of the West state.
WORLD MEDITATION DAY HISTORY
The meditation practices traces its roots up to about 3000 B.C. But, some scholars extended that meditation can be as aged as humanity itself, saying that even Neanderthals may have had meditative capabilities. Derived from a Latin word ‘meditatum,’ a meditation referred to the set of techniques or methods that individuals are using to attain the heightened sense of alertness and focus on attaining the stable and calm state, both emotionally and mentally.
Meditation may be firmly outlined back to the 1500 B.C. and India, where the old records reference that ‘jhana’ or ‘dhyana,’ practice or the mind training. These records are believed to be originated from the Hindu custom of ‘Vedantism.’ Meditation has roots also in the ancient China, and as way backed as the 3rd and 6th centuries with those writings of Laozi, the prehistoric Chinese philosopher. He utilized some terms the same with the meditation techniques being used in the later centuries within his works. Some from these terms include the ‘Shou Zhong,’ which mean “guarding the middle”, then ‘Bao Yi,’ which means “embracing the one.” In spite these connections to India and China, it is hard to trace the precise origin about meditation since it is practiced with many religions and cultures like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These have all inclined what meditation is now.
Meditation did not creep into the Western culture until during the twentieth century. During 1960s, Herbert Benson, the Harvard Medical School instructor, start to study the technical aspect of meditation, discovering that those people that meditated used about 17% less oxygen when compared with others. In year 1990s, meditation starts to be observed as fashionable in the US, especially with celebrities unifying the trend. Now, around 9.3 million adults used meditation annually.
BENEFITS OF MEDITATION BASE ON SCEINCE
Meditation has shown to give numerous benefits. Although it is famous as the method to decrease anxiety and stress, research showed that it can help also to improve the mood, promote good and healthy sleep patterns, that it can also boost cognitive ability.
Meditation is a habitual procedure of training the mind to concentrate and redirect the thoughts. The fame of meditation is progressing since lots of people discovered the numerous health benefits of it. Anyone can use it for increasing their self awareness and their surroundings too. Many people thought of it as the means to decrease stress and to develop concentration.
People uses the practice of developing other beneficial feelings and habits, like a positive outlook and mood, healthy sleep patterns, self-discipline, and it can increased pain tolerance also.
Benefits of Meditation
1. Reduces stress
Meditation lives up with reputation for the stress reduction.
The meditation style known as “mindfulness meditation” will decrease the inflammation responses caused by stress. Meditation may improve also the symptoms of those stress-related conditions, like irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia and the post-traumatic stress disorders.
Many ways of meditation may help to reduce stress. Meditation may likewise reduce the symptoms in people that have stress-triggered medical situations.
2. Controls anxiety
Habitual meditation will reduce stress levels that translate to lesser anxiety.
Eight weeks of your mindfulness meditation will help reduce anxiety symptoms to people that have generalized anxiety disorder, together with improving stress reactivity, increasing positive self-statement and coping up. The eight-week meditation course may lead to noticeable improvements from anxiety, pain over and depression.
The variety of meditation exercises and 8 weeks mindfulness meditation can reduce anxiety levels, like yoga that is known to help people decrease their anxiety. It is because of the benefits from both the physical activity and the meditative practice. It can also improve the feeling of well-being, improve stress reactivity with coping skills and will decreased distress and also job strains.
3. Promotes emotional health
There are some types of meditation that will lead to enhance self-image and the more positive outlook to one’s life.
Mindfulness meditation therapies and meditation exercises enhanced symptoms of depression, and there are fewer negative thoughts develop. Also, meditation can reduce depression by declining the levels of the inflammatory chemicals.
There are some types of meditation that will improve depression and will decrease the negative thoughts. It can also decrease the stages of inflammatory cytokines that could contribute to a depression.
4. Enhance self-awareness
Some types of meditation will help develop the stronger understanding of oneself, helping you to grow into your ideal self.
Self-inquiry meditation clearly aims to assist you to develop the best understanding of yourself plus how you are relating yourself to others. Practicing Tai chi can be linked with the improved self-efficacy that is a term being used to describe the person’s faith in their own ability to overcome the challenge.
Mindfulness meditation can increased social contact and reduced the feelings of loneliness. Experience in meditation can cultivate more creative issue-solving skills. Self-inquiry can help in “knowing yourself!”
5. Lengthens attention span
The focused-attention meditation has been like weight lifting to your attention span.
The tape meditation experience will help endure your attention, increase your strength, and have accuracy when completing a task. Regular practiced meditation performed well on visual task and has the best attention span. It can also reverse patterns of one’s brain that will contribute to someone’s mind-wandering, poor attention and worrying. Daily meditation enhances memory and attention.
Several kinds of meditation can build the ability maintain attention and to redirect attention.
6. May decrease age-related of memory loss
Improvements with clarity of thinking and attention can help keep the mind young.
The Kirtan Kriya method of meditation combines a chant or mantra with repetitive motions of the fingers that will focus on the thoughts. People that have age-related loss of memory exhibit to improve performance on the neuropsychological tests. Also many meditation styles may increase attention, mental quickness and memory in older volunteers. Meditation can partially improve memory of dementia patients.
The improved concentration you will gain by regular meditation can boost your mental clarity and memory. These benefits may help fight dementia and age-related loss of memory.
7. Can generate kindness
There are some kinds of meditation can particularly increase actions and positive feelings towards you and the others.
Metta, a kind of meditation also called as the loving-kindness meditation, starts with developing kind beliefs and feelings toward you. By practice, people discover to extend their kindness and their forgiveness externally. It increases peoples’ compassion toward them and to others. Metta meditation improved positive emotions, understanding of others and interpersonal interactions.
Loving-kindness meditation or metta is the practice of developing optimistic feelings toward you and toward others. Metta progresses empathy, compassionate behavior and positivity toward others.
8. May help fight addiction
The mental discipline you’ll develop by meditation can help you break dependency through increasing awareness of triggers and self-control for addictive behaviors.
Meditation may assist people learn to manage their emotions, impulses, redirect the attention, and increase the understanding of the cause behind. The transcendental meditation was link with the psychological pain, can lower the levels of stress and also alcohol cravings. Meditation may help to control food cravings. Mindfulness meditation helped the participants to reduce emotional and also binge eating.
Meditation developed mental awareness and will help to manage triggers for those unwanted impulses. It can help to recover from addiction, redirect other unwanted habit and manage unhealthy eating habit.
9. Improves sleep
Nearly about half of the populace may struggle with insomnia.
People who meditated remain asleep longer and have improved insomnia severity. Becoming skilled in the meditation can help you redirect or control the racing and the runaway thoughts which often lead to having insomnia. It can help release tension, relax your body and place you in a serene state.
Varieties of meditation techniques will help you to relax and to control runaway thoughts which can interfere with your sleep. This can reduce the time it will take to fall asleep which will increase the quality of your sleep.
10 Helps control pain
The perception of pain had been linked to your mood, and it will be elevated in demanding conditions.
Some of the research suggested that incorporating meditation to your routine can be beneficial for the managing pain. Mindfulness meditation could improve life’s quality, reduce pain, and decrease depression symptoms with chronic pain.
Meditation can reduce the perception of the brain’s pain. This can help treat the chronic pain if used to physical therapy or supplement medical care.
11. Can decrease the blood pressure
Meditation may improve physical health through reducing strain on your heart.
Eventually, high blood pressure makes a heart work harder for blood pumping, which can head to the poor heart function. The high blood pressure contributes to atherosclerosis, the narrowing of the artery that can lead to stroke or heart attack. Meditation helped to decrease blood pressure. Meditation appeared to manage blood pressure through relaxing the nerve signal that coordinated blood vessel tension, heart function, and that “fight-or-flight” reply which increases awareness in the stressful situations.
Blood pressure reduces not just during meditation but over time to people who meditate regularly. It can decrease the heart and arteries strain and help to prevent heart illness.
12 Accessible anywhere
People are practicing lots of different outlines of meditation, and most of which do not require specialized space or equipment.
Two major methods of meditation:
Open-monitoring meditation. The style promotes broadened awareness in every aspect of your surroundings, sense of self and train of thought. It may contain becoming aware of the suppressed thoughts, impulses or feelings.
Focused-attention meditation. The style concentrates the attention on the solo sound, visualization, object, and thought. It emphasizes ridding the mind of distractions. The meditation can concentrate on breathing, calming sound or a mantra.
If the regular home and work environments don’t allow for quiet, consistent alone time, consider partaking in a class. It can improve the chances of success through giving a supportive community.
Conclusion
Meditation is a thing that anyone can do to enhance their emotional and mental health. You can practice it anywhere, without memberships or special equipment. There is a great diversity of styles each with different benefits and strengths. Trying out a great style of meditation fit for your goals is the best way to enhance your quality of living.